More Honey, Less Vinegar BY MICHAEL JORGENSEN, EXECUTIVE VICE CHAIRMAN, NCASEF
The past year and a half has been challenging for 7-Eleven franchisees, to say the least. One of our biggest hardships has been finding employees willing to work in our stores. This labor shortage is affecting businesses large and small throughout the country. Thanks to very generous unemployment benefits, many people are not willing to go back to work just yet and because of this, many franchisees have had to work extra shifts at their stores. Although SEI has allowed stores to close overnight in many instances, and has tools available to help us find employees, the company is also rolling out new programs at a time when we’re already low on personnel. To top it off, SEI is now requiring all franchised stores to return to 24-hour operation. Franchisees are overwhelmed. We need more support and patience from our franchisor, not more punitive actions. We want SEI to understand the burden that they have put on franchisees with the implementation of all these new programs that, while in the long run may be beneficial, are creating a tremendous amount of confusion and additional workload at a time when franchisees are struggling with staffing issues. And if SEI wants our stores to return to 24-hour operation, then incentivize us, don’t penalize us. One of the new programs SEI has released amid the pandemic is Accounting System Improvement 2 (ASI2), which we are told had to roll out because the old mainframe and program needed to be replaced. There have been so many issues and corrections needed in this new accounting system, not to mention a huge learning curve, that SEI has placed audits for ASI2 stores on hold until they can fig-
ure out what's going on with it. Franchisees are bearing the burden and are frustrated because of this rollout. Along with ASI2 now we’re supposed to receive our reports through 7Cloud, and at the same time SEI is rolling out another program that basically eliminates the need to store information on the store ISP, and instead moves everything to the cloud, called 7Boss. Even though 7Boss has some different and welcomed functions—for example, you can order remotely from outside your
store—some of the reports are not as user-friendly as the software we've had in the past, and it will take some getting used to. Rolling out all these programs at the same time, when they're not fully
“Rolling out all these programs at the same time, when they're not fully tested, puts franchisees in a bad spot trying to reconcile all of their accounting.”
“Although SEI has allowed stores to close overnight in many instances, and has tools available to help us find employees, the company is also rolling out new programs at a time when we’re already low on personnel.” tested, means the folks at SEI don’t really know the scope of the problems they might entail, and puts franchisees in a bad spot trying to reconcile all of their accounting. Franchisees now must work through all of these new tools to reconcile the financial reports and to investigate any inventory variation. It used to be that our Merchandise Report matched up to our Purchase Summary, and we would create a case for any discrepancies. Now things like Markup/Markdown are in separate reports that we can only access by signing on to 7-Hub, while in the past we used to get the Markup/Markdown Reports right from our ISP. We could easily verify the accuracy of the Markup/Markdown Reports by pulling up how many cups of coffee we sold and our retail selling price on the coffee. Now we have to actually go into 7-Hub and pull several different reports—a Price Override Markup/Markdown Report (POR), a Non-Inventory Sales Report (NIS), a Promo Sales Report (PSR) and then the DMR and the Purchase Summary from the store—in order to try to piece everything together on what happened with our inventory on a continued on page 30 AVANTI M AY | J U N E 2 0 2 1
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